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• n  a vault or building where corpses or bones are deposited
• s  gruesomely indicative of death or the dead
  a charnel smell came from the chest filled with dead men's bones

• And yet it is scarcely 60 years since hospitals were like charnel houses.
• Her home is a jail, but outside the city whose byways it has been her job and passion to celebrate is a charnel house she fears to enter.
• For millions of vegetarians, beef is a four-letter word; veal summons charnel visions of infanticide.

• charnel house
• ghastly
• sepulchral

News & Articles

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• Mideast power vacuum enables al-Qaida
  BEIRUT - The images of recent days have an eerie familiarity, as if the horrors of the past decade were being played back: masked gunmen of al-Qaeda recapturing the Iraqi cities of Falluja and Ramadi, where so many U.S. soldiers died fighting them. Car bombs exploding amid the elegance of downtown Beirut. The charnel house of Syria's worsening civil war.
  Jan. 4, 2014 - Worcester Telegram & Gazette

Quotes

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• Winston Churchill in BBC News
  Winston Churchill, Britain's wartime leader, called postwar Europe "a rubble heap, a charnel-house, a breeding-ground for pestilence and hate".
• Kevin Baker in New York Times
  (Random House, $13.95.) This first novel, about the Irish potato famine of the 1840s, is "an absorbing, unsparing and beautifully written account of one young man's escape from the charnel house that Ireland became," Kevin Baker said in the Book...
• Gerald Kaufman in guardian.co.uk
  Labour's Gerald Kaufman says the Gaza strip is now a "blood-spattered charnel house", and asks for categorical condemnation of the Israeli government for their "slaughter" of innocent Palestinians yesterday.